Monday, 12 December 2016

It’s normal in our twenty-something age to think about
what we’ve not reached yet. It happened to me. I used almost all my past mornings
to think what I will reach today, this month, this year. It’s not only resolutions,
but also achievements. If I have failed to achieve something, it meant that I
was failed at all.

I remember how school’s biology taught us about the
outcome of a person which depend on genetic and environment. I feel that I am
somehow borned as a achiever, who wants to achieve everything I can get. Moreover
I have the environment which supported that. I used to think how to be number 1
in class, joined competition, and be the champion.

Two years ago I landed in this amazing country which after
all gave me different perspective. As there are only less than 50 Indonesian
who works as a professional here, we usually have weekly gathering. Despite of
the sparse of their origin in Indonesia, they’re surprisingly uniformed. As the
only under 30 years old, they gave me many things to learn.

I always belief that I’ll life different live after I
reach 40. I will be wise, calm, and be very grateful of everything I have
achieved. As soon after I blended to Indonesian community here, I started to realize
that I wouldn’t wait until 40 to make those things happened.

Everything started to change. From thinking how I can
reach my dream, I started to feel that I have reached my real dream, and now it’s
time to help my children reach their dream. I started to think how I can raise them
in a proper way, at all aspects. I started to think how I can give my kids good
examples on how’s a good life is. And I started to think that I already reach
finish point.

Sunday, 27 November 2016

I started off this morning with a happy smile on my face. The weather were good with rain all day long. Everyone jumped the rain, as if it’s only came once in decades. Clearly it comes more than once in a decade, even more than once in a year, but that once in decades' feel is true if you live in here. After long drought of summer, when it comes to November, everything changed dramatically.

It's dramatic as my life years ago until it lasted 2 years ago. The flexible working hours time in IBM at that time brought me to found a startup during my tenure in IBM. I was also keen to applying to Graduate School, the best one of them, named Stanford, MIT, Berkeley. I was trying to work in startup full time, but failing on it, and tried to work in a totally different industry afterwards.

After 3 months running a startup company, I found that it was really promising and I chose to quit from IBM to fully working on the startup. I worked very hard for average of 12 hours a day, until I found out 6 months later that things didn’t work so good. The startup is now disappeared – even the domain is already on the cheap auction – as if nothing had been happened.

I then worked in a company which specialized in heavy equipment and mines industry. It was a long story why I chose that way, which in a nutshell will be like this: “my father lost his full pension fund while he invested in a heavy equipment and mines company”. I was not only learning heavy equipment and mines, in a relative short time, I traveled to fabulous places, places that I haven’t visited. I work there until I realized the farthest I learn into the business, things that happened to my father can’t be undone.

At that moment, I was type of person that stick on the my dream. For me, the right thing were only working on big software company, studying in top notch US school, and live happily ever after. Suddenly, I get an offer from a company which I never heard of, in a location that I never dreamed of. While I didn’t know exactly what life can bring me with my previous employer, taking another gambling was not making situation became any worse.

I accepted the offer and the process of taking me away from my country was happening very fast. It’s kind of Doraemon’s door who suddenly put me in a country where I am today, on the same month two years ago.

Again, things were changing quite contrast. While I had expected to work very hard as an expatriate in a fast growing country, everything surprisingly became way slower and easier. Thus I have been having good time for my kids, and seeing things in different way.

If we remembered time when we were in the school, most of us will say that we were very happy at that time, happier than we are now. Working on a small thing at one time was probably one reason. We didn’t think how we could live in the future 10 years, what if we’re failing, and options of better things than what we were already doing. We were just simply sticking to one thing and working on it.

The way I feel happier now is most probably because of the same reason. Fewer options that I can do made me focus to what I am doing. For example, I can’t simply build a business here, not only because it’s not possible as my employer restriction, but also because of the some weird policies that applied only to expatriates.

The other possible reason come from how grateful I'm to the life I live. I happened to think what I already have instead of thinking something I don’t. Having beautiful wife, wonderful kids, and best work environment, what else? But I also realized that even though we’re living on a lowest point in life, we can always find reasons why we have to be grateful.

In these two years, those are things that I learned, as simple things that changed my life. Hopefully this writing can be a self reminder to myself in the future, in case I have a chance of forgetting these while chasing a better–called life.